King: Let's treat drug addicts with doctors, not police

By Bill King

Published 7:19 pm, Wednesday, April 11, 2012

The premise that underpins our criminal justice system is that individuals have the free will to choose between right and wrong, at least as right and wrong are defined by law. We impose a penalty on those who have, of their own free will, made the wrong decision in the belief that the punishment will deter them from making the same choice in the future and will deter others in society from making similar bad choices.

When we determine that people did not act of their own free will, such as when a person is legally insane, we excuse that person from the consequences of their actions.

The idea that the sale and use of drugs should be illegal largely arose in the first half of the 20th century, when we had little understanding of the science of addiction. Then, and even now to a large degree, the abuse of drugs is seen as a moral failing - a bad exercise of free will. However, science is increasingly showing that the use of drugs actually changes our brain chemistry and thus affects our ability to make the very moral judgments implicit in the criminal justice paradigm. The National Institutes of Health defines drug addiction as "a chronic, relapsing brain disease that is characterized by compulsive drug seeking and use, despite harmful consequences." The NIH goes on to say, "It is considered a brain disease because drugs change the brain - they change its structure and how it works."

The NIH concludes that while the decision to use drugs initially is mostly voluntary, once a person becomes addicted, it is not. If that is true and we are punishing people who are not acting out of free will, the entire logical underpinning of our criminal justice system is called into question.

In addition to basing the criminalization of drug use on a questionable theoretical legal basis, the many practical negative effects of criminalization have been well documented.

Accidental poisonings from drug overdoses now lead automobile accidents as the leading cause of accidental death in the country. Virtually all of these overdose deaths are attributable to addicts receiving adulterated drugs or doses of varying purity and strength. Even the most dangerous and addictive drugs, when administered in medically controlled conditions, rarely result in the death of the patient.

Among these is the fact that an increasingly large share of HIV infections are due to addicts sharing tainted needles. One study estimated that through 2009, contaminated needles had caused 290,000 HIV infections. One study in Europe found that 60 percent of all new HIV infections were caused by drug injections rather that sex.

And as I discussed previously, the economic costs of the attempt to interdict drugs and the incarceration of users runs in the hundreds of billions of dollars. The U.S. incarceration rate at the start of the War on Drugs was just over 100 per 100,000 Americans. Today it is more than 700 per 100,000.

August Vollmer was a police chief in the first half of the 20th century in California. He was a trailblazer in modern law enforcement techniques and served as president of the International Association of Police Chiefs in 1921. He is frequently referred to as the Father of Modern Law Enforcement. The push to criminalize drug use largely arose during his career. In a 1936 paper on the subject, Vollmer said, "Drug addiction … is not a police problem; it never has been, and never can be solved by policemen. It is first and last a medical problem." It makes one wonder where we would be today if his advice had been heeded.

A few years ago, Bruce Willis starred in the movie "Siege." In the movie, Willis plays an Army general. There have been a series of terrorist attacks in New York and the president is considering sending in the Army to track down those responsible. Willis is asked his opinion about using the Army for this purpose. In arguing against the deployment, he answered, "The Army is a broadsword, not a scalpel." Increasingly, it appears that we have mistakenly been using weapons of war in our attempts to deal with our drug problem instead of medical instruments. More next week on how we might change that approach.